Posted by DA Morgan on 10/20/07 17:04

Erland Sommarskog wrote:
> Greg D. Moore (Strider) (mooregr_deleteth1s@greenms.com) writes:
>> However, I would suspect simply deleting the files would cause error
>> messages to show up when Oracle was restarted or the system was restarted?
>> Most likely this would be non-fatal but as I prefer to run w/o errors, I'm
>> curious as to the "correct" way to remove a database on a Unix system.
>
> You probably don't do that by deleting files. It was very long ago since
> I had reason to work with a database on Unix, but when I worked with
> Sybase in the first half of the nineties the strong recommendation was
> to put production databases on raw partitions. This may very well have
> changed since then, and it could be different for Oracle. The problem
> with database files in the file system was that the DB engine had to use
> synchronous operations to be sure that data was down on disk, and not
> buffered in the file system. Or something like that. It was a very long
> time ago.

RAW is still the fastest place to be ... with Oracle, with DB2,
with Informix, with Sybase, and I'd bet with SQL Server too if
anyone in the Windows world was technical enough to install and
benchmark it.

With Oracle one generally uses ASM to manage RAW as it provides
performance slightly better than most RAW device solutions plus
makes management quite easy.

It should be noted that these days *NIX solutions, including Linux,
offer asynch i/o.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
damorgan@x.washington.edu (replace x with u to respond)

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